How Tilkee CEO Sylvain Tillon grew Tilkee to $5M revenue and 1.6K customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs to our number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per top five in six million his happens on global domination we just broke a hundred thousand units so mark and i'm your host nathan lapka okay top tribe this week's winner of the 100 bucks that i get away every monday is kim dust she's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side m congrats for years a chance to win 100 bucks every monday simply subscribe to the podcast on itunes now and then text the word nathan the three three four four four two officially enter again text the word nathan two three three four four four after you subscribe guys if you want an easy tool to use to book your meetings back to back to match your calls to make sure people actually show from a schedule you want to use a cutie scheduling it's what i use from my podcast interviews and nathan ladka calm toward /schedule i'll tell you more about how i use it later on in the episode nathan lack to hear this episode 5 33 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from darien Shirazi he's a CEO of radius he's 29 years old they just raised a hundred million dollars and they're helping expand b2b sales pipelines top jaw good morning and nathan ladki here and our guest today is tim assam way he is the CTO at a company called till key which is this a solution software for business proposals follow-up in sales process tracking it's a super hot space before that he was involved with 0 x fo Z technologies as the CEO is also manager of General Services at another company and also project manager at travel do all right Tim Kate are you guys ready to take us to the top yes alright very good and Kate you are just real quick tell us how to tell us so your role at till king and we'll jump in I'm business about that i'm actually i'm currently developing the european market along with my colleagues focusing mainly on the UK because I'm English as you can probably tell very good so Tim give us an overview of kind of wet till he does specifically and then how you guys generate revenue with your business model ok I'm so it's the beach is very simple and as a as a sales man and I used to be assessment not very good very good one I'm engineer so it was a real challenge from into every cell and and when I used to send my business proposal basically it was PDF file and put in a male and when I push the send button of my mail the contact with my prospectus it last so I used to do a couple of randoms for last but it was never a good time to my post pay and nobody called me back so that's why we created with silver my co-founder well that's why we created and teak is a very simple software else asks that you can use to to analyze analyze the the reading behavior of your prospect and using TG you are unable to to follow on the right prospect at the right time with the right message and is this measure hello yo is it specifically for documents kind of PDFs it's any kind of any kind of documents PDF Word PowerPoint video crazy but at one stage yeah you need to send its indicate that you need to send the PDF in a min male great okay so give us some more history on business what year did you launch it in so it was fine what year did you launch the business end we began in his three years and half ago at the very beginning it was a side project with with Silva we was add our own companies and it was making pedagogy tools and I was building websites basically and silver figured out that they should be the great idea to actually pull ups on the business proposals I mean using this kind of tools and I jumped in India the adventure and we created till key then and after a couple of winning a lot of challenges French and international we are them some business some trolls and thumbs and then came to us and we Tim real quick let me just back up before I get too far down the story so you launched it kind of mid-2012 which was about you said three and a half years ago do you remember what your first year revenue was it's always it usually an embarrassing number oh yeah nothing I would say 20 thousand ok twenty thousand and then take us forward real quick but then we'll go kind of back to the story so give us a sense of size now how many customers are you serving ok we serve around eight hundred customers from status to lunch by size companies like a ranch ethical and it's really a fortune 500 European companies okay and and I see your pricing plans kind of go from solo at 19 / month up to up to about 1,500 that's a big big range on average if you just take a weighted average across your entire customer base what's the average customer paying you vermont huh it's quite difficult because for i will say small customer that have less than the 10 users the average is 500 per year but we have a very big customers which have more than 200 500 sees and that can be 50,000 and and more and I've customers with to reach 5,000 okay so if we I mean I mean maybe the better question is wanting to just kind of scale us up so you launched in mid-2012 what was your monthly recurring revenue at the end of 2015 in December antennas last year it was pink range where a twenty20 MMA and we are one of the 100 now oh great so you're doing so again 20,000 n is at USD Tim yes ok perfect thanks we're going to conversion in your head I know that's probably what you were doing there and you're appreciate it so twenty twenty thousand united states dollars at the end of a december up kind of 2015 which would have been about a two hundred forty thousand dollar ARR rate there now almost a year later up to well they're growing really fast to almost five acts to your over a year now doing about a hundred thousand bucks in monthly recurring revenue and Tim what would you credit that growth to is it seed expansion enterprise customers what is it ok kate is showing it Kate Kate Kate wants a raise Kate what's where's the growth coming from okay honestly we have we had to educate the market in France specially so you took us a long time we we made also some pythons called a get em customers so before that we used to sell to a very small companies and we have into an occupied size or much bigger company and also we are yeah we will catch it a lot of very talented what we call tinker's and they address a lot to convince our lease and doing this here so did I get this right Tim you kind of pivoted with the product and the user base they use race with small kind of businesses and now you're much more enterprise and you also pivoted the product to serve the enterprise better as well as that accurate absolutely and have you raised capital of you as you've done this or you bootstraps yes we whisk until two years ago we ways the 1 million women Anna have the rocks and he said that was two years ago yes so that means right now your eat raising more capital or urine acquisition talks which one is it okay we are just began even last month in graduations thank you and we are thinking about raising more money next year well you're in the right spot to do it because you don't need it right exactly that's good what it's as a CEO when you think about how much money you like to raise you said you're doing about a hundred grand in monthly recurring revenue how do you think about how much you would raise if you did raise um unless I mean we we won't go for typical series a well we don't want that because we want to keep the control of the company and for that we will we will raise much more natural than two million okay got it so and when you say control the company you mean more than fifty percent amongst all the co-founders yes and confront us and no please so do you have any kind of an option will do all employees have some amount of equity yes so very good i love that I you know talk to CEOs and they're typically one way or the other they either don't give employees any options outside of the founders or they have an option pool and they give some amount of shares even if it's very little to every employee so they're incentivized yeah i think these presents between we have some place actually both Sean shares oh great five percent of the company's no to some of the employees and we also have some options that we are giving to some of the injuries got it got it well so is it fair to say if you're wanting to make sure you guys keep at least fifty percent of the company and you wouldn't raise more than two million that you'd value it sounds your valiant somewhere around like what three million post-money or pre money but that's that I do you think about or the real question is how do you think about valuation um the typical variation in your world the nice x yeah yeah okay um so when we think will be more than 1 million yeah and end of next year so well you're already I didn't you say you're already out of 100 thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue yes just this this last month so we have to show the progress for the next month thankies...